Tag Archives: meetups

The Automattic sponsored staff members of the Global Community Team, who routinely handle WPCS banking, will be at a company offsite September 11-18. During this time we’ll halt WordCamp and Meetup vendor payments, reimbursements, and sponsor payment attribution. If you’ll need to pay for goods or services in mid-September, please submit all requests no later than 9am Pacific Friday, September 8, 2017. Payment requests submitted after that time will not likely be processed until Tuesday, September 19, 2017. Sponsor invoices paid September 11-18 won’t be marked paid until September 19.

If you have an urgent payment request that must be handled that week, but did not submit your request prior to September 8, please reach out to @kcristiano. He can be found on slack “@kcristiano“.

Deputies, mentors, and community members will still be available by email at support@wordcamp.org or on Slack in the #community-events channel.

Normal vendor payment and sponsorship attributions scheduled will resume Tuesday, September 19, 2017 though it may take us a day or two to get fully caught up.

It seems odd that in our ever expanding documentation we don’t really have much content on the best practices for presenters in our program. Given that presenters are one of the cornerstones on which we build WordCamps and Meetups that’s something we’d like to change but we need everyone’s help.

We’re looking for a good general set of best practices for each of the following specific presenters/ presentations so please let us know what has worked best for you both at events at which you’ve presented and which you’ve organized.

Opening Remarks

Emcees

Speakers

Example questions we’re looking to answer: What should be covered during opening remarks? How much content should an emcee share? How do you deal with attendees who interrupt your presentation?

But please don’t let that limit your response. Anything that can be of help to organizers, presenters, and emcees at WordCamps and Meetups could be relevant. We’re looking to curate some truly helpful advice and best practices for the handbook so let us know what you know, or what you’d like to see.

We currently have a policy that WordPress Chapter Meetup groups who have not received swag in the past 18 months are eligible for to receive a 100-pack of WordPress swag (which contains 100 stickers and 100 buttons with the WordPress logo). The reason we have this policy is because we usually restock swag with that 18 month cycle in mind. However, it’s possible that we need to scale that up if lots of organizers are experiencing unusual growth in their groups.

Do you think that this is of concern, especially as more Meetup groups experience growth, and as we’re seeing more new Meetup groups being created?

If so, what solution(s) would you suggest? Please share your thoughts in the comments!

UPDATE: We intend on coming to a decision on this on Friday, 21 July, soon after the Community Team meeting. Please chime in with any suggestions or opinions in the comments before then. Thanks!

At the Contributor Day for WordCamp Europe this year (which will be taking place on 15 June), we will be holding a group meetup orientation at some point during the day. So, if you’re planning on starting a meetup group in your area and you will be attending the Contributor Day, then please get your meetup application in as soon as you can by filling in this form. That way we can process it before the day and you can join in the group meetup orientation along with the other new organisers who will be doing the same thing.

Even if you are attending the Contributor Day as part of a different contribution team, you can still attend the meetup orientation as it will not be longer than 1 hour. We will decide on the time of day for the orientation closer to the date, and will let those of you who are going to be a part of it know when it will be.

This will be a great way to kick start your meetup group as you will immediately have a friendly network of other organisers who you have chatted to in person 🙂

Dear Meetup Organizers

A favorite moment in all WordPress meetups is that time when you meet new WordPress users and hear their stories of how they use WordPress. Sometimes it’s a simple blog, sometimes it’s a complex content management system for news, or a mid sized e-commerce site for their local store front. Whatever the story, it’s always fascinating.

We would like your help in sharing those stories with the WordPress community.

Can you take a few moments to record a video testimonial with one of the attendees at each of your meetups? Nothing fancy, no special cameras, microphones or glaring lights. Just a camera phone and a good, honest story that will inspire others as they search for how to use WordPress for their own projects.

Let’s do this in March and April, folks. WordCamps count, too.

As Dave Navarro says, impromptu videos are best.

“I work for a TV and Radio station in the midwest and I can tell you, from experience, that unpolished raw video has more of an impact on most people in social media than polished professional video.”

We would like to share ways that people are promoting, growing and sustaining their local meetups.

The idea will be to collect what people are doing in their local areas and turn them into information we can share with everyone via our meetup handbooks and the way we give meetup support to all the organisers we meet.

Let us know below how you are organising your local meetup and share your ways of promoting, growing and sustaining the local community where you are!

Hello hello!
As some of you might know, last April the Polyglots team hosted the first Global Translation Day with 24 hours of streamed sessions and live events around the world. It was an incredible experience: we translated thousands of strings, on-boarded hundreds of new contributors and ate tons of cake (oh well, that might have been only in Torino). If you wanna read some really impressive statistics, head over to the recap post:

It was such an incredible experience that we decided to have another one on November 12 and we would like to get *even* more people excited from all over the world.

I have been involved with Polyglots and Community for a while now and I think it would be very helpful to have the support from the Community team to do some outreach.

I will get in touch with WordCamps that have Contributor Days coming up to announce the event, and I think it would be super cool and effective if we could send a message to all Meetups organizers in the chapter: @chanthaboune do you think it would be possible?

We have a ton of materials from last WGTD to help Meetups organise a local event if they want to, even if they never contributed to Polyglots before.

Here is the website for the upcoming event: https://wptranslationday.org/
Here are all the videos recorded last time, I think they make an incredible resource for Meetups: http://wordpress.tv/event/global-wordpress-translation-day-2016/

Can you think of other ways to get local communities involved? I am all ears! We can brainstorm here or chat on Slack, I am @francina.

In general the mentorship programme is working well and being very effective. Given that the number of active WordCamps fluctuates over the course of the year, there are times of the year when we do not have enough mentors and times when we do. Right now we do not have enough to cover all of the camps that need them.

She noted that we have not been sending out the monthly emails to meetup groups around the world and some discussion was had about possibly making those email quarterly instead of attempting to do them monthly.

Miscellaneous

We are in the process of moving our P2 to an O2 (much like the Meta blog has already). Everything will continues to work as it should, but it’s worth mentioning.

The team at WordCamp Central has grown with the addition of @courtneypk and @hlashbrooke – this means we have more effective coverage across most time zones.

Remember that these monthly Community team chats are on The first Thursday of every month at 19:00 UTC in #outreach on Slack. Have a look at the sidebar of this P2 for other meeting & office hours times.

The last week I was working with a newly created WordPress Meetup Organizer handbook. The training as it is now can be found here. As you can see, the pages were moved to the testing site and small quizzes were added. You are very welcome to try it out, and if you have any feedback regarding the way it works please feel free to let me know.

Some changes we will implement later are:

Replace the links to the handbook materials with the links to the equivalent training site materials – after it will be decided where exactly will this site be hosted,

Possibly expand the introduction and conclusion a bit.

Another alteration of the initial plan I didn’t mention last time is that we decided to have small quizzes after each lesson as opposed to larger quizzes in the end of each module, that is composed out of several lessons. The reasoning for that is that Sensei is designed in the way that if you want the “composed” quiz, all of the questions have to be linked to the module’s last lesson – which can become a disadvantage if you decide to move one of the lessons to another module or delete one of the lessons — the questions appended to this lessons will get orphaned and end up impeding the learning experience. On the other hand, having all questions based on the lesson’s content linked to exactly this lesson enables a more flexible, chunking and reuse-oriented structure.

Next week I’ll be working on questions for the WordPress deputy handbook-based training. And I will also get to go to WordCamp Europe, which I’m so excited about! I’m really looking forward to seeing community members in person and witnessing all the WordCamp glory and bonanza in real life, not just imagining it while reading the WordCamp organization-related materials. So please expect a full report about this trip next week 🙂 Also, at WordCamp Europe the WordCamp and Meetup organizer courses will be ready for testing on contributor day.

Community Deputy Program

Community Deputies are a team of people all over the world who review WordCamp and Meetup applications, interview lead organizers, and generally keep things moving at WordCamp Central. Here are some useful links about the program: